To some people, the 80s were all about the rivalry between Duran Duran and Wham!
People talk of the playground being divided by a huge tennis net, and long lunch hours spent with their faces pressed against the mesh, their snarling maws hungry for the flesh of the enemy. Geography lessons dominated by the constant slinging of sharpened 45 records, like saw-wheel shuriken. Midnight atrocities committed on the all-weather pitch, atrocities that still replay themselves in the dreams of the victims.
Well, here’s what you can do with your old pop rivalry. You can take it, and you can fold in into a paper aeroplane. Then you can hop onto your back, thrust your legs into the air, and stabilising yourself with your left elbow, launch the paper aeroplane directly upwards. Then – quickly, you don’t have much time – put your hands on your hips, and manouevre your bumhole into the path of the plane, so it goes right in (hint! You can tear little rudders into the rear of the wings, and it’ll make it look like you have a superior understanding of aerodynamics).
Fuck ’em. The real battle for the hearts and minds of British schoolchildren (by which I primarily mean me) was between Jennifer Lynch’s tale of amputation beyond the call of medical duty, Boxing Helena, and the moral comedy Eating Raoul, in which a pair of “straights” invite dogfucking dwarves into their home and kill them.
To say I’ve never seen the films until this week, they’ve had a lifelong disproportionate hold on me. It’s the titles. Even though Eating Raoul is a bit of a spoiler, what with the killing and eating of Raoul being the punchline of the entire fucking film, and even if Helena spends close to no time in a box (and even spends the first forty, long minutes of the film with all four arms and legs), that didn’t stop those two titles sitting in the spit on the tip of my tongue.
PAUL: What do you want to do tonight
ME: Well at 7 we’ll be Eating Raoul, but after that I’m free if you want to pop around Helena’s, she needs boxing.
PAUL: Dirtboxing?
ME: Don’t be childish.
ANYWAY RIGHT, I’ve just watched both films, and this is what I’ve learned:
1) I have rewritten my life to believe that Boxing Helena came out when I was in school. In fact, it came out in 1994. So that conversation wasn’t me being a charmingly precocious twelve year old, it was me being a subnormal twenty-something. Then again, I just did this in Tesco, and the most remarkable thing about this is the fact I’m 36.
Also, what the fuck is Tarragon? It sounds like a robot from the seventies. Who buys this shit?
2) Because I’d been told the shock summary about Boxing Helena – “it’s about a man who cuts off a woman’s arms and legs, and keeps her in a box,” I’d imagined a very different movie. The other line that people always said, to demonstrate a profounder understanding of human behaviour, was “but the thing is, she’s always in control“. Naturally, I imagined Helena riding her surgeon around the house, guiding him with the reins in her mouth, and being snippy with him.
3) Speaking of people pretending to have a deep insight into movies, my childhood friend John once told me that “Star Wars isn’t a story of good and evil – it’s cleverer than that. They let you make your own mind up”. I see on Facebook he’s joined the group “ENGLAND IS FULL – NO MORE IMMIGRANTS”. I guess I should have seen that coming. This doesn’t have much to do with Helena or Raoul, I’m a bit bored with the format though
4) It’s OK to keep a woman hostage as long as a) she eventually likes it, b) any sex scenes have the limbs momentarily restored, and c) it was all a dream anyway so like what the fuck.
5) It’s OK to kill and eat Hispanics as long as they’re taken with a decent wine
Now to put my life lessons into practice – if I’m not back in three hours, split my possessions amongst yourselves.
